Close-Community Missed

To all our St John friends,

I was 6 years old when I first visited St John… we rounded it off with a visit to St. Croix and we stayed on St. Thomas with friends of my mother… I remember a peaceful enjoyable trip with a bit of magic as I delighted in finding lizards and beautiful colorful flowers I had never seen.

I remember the happy faces of the West Indians… and continentals alike. This was after all 1970.

Hey there weren’t even 500 people on all of St. John. Well years go by… I get older, get married, and get caught up in the NY rat race… Yet even tho I was financially secure, I wasn’t happy… perhaps a move to a diff place… perhaps a place that had once brought me peace… how about St John?

The next thing I know I am moving to SJ, and after hiring a helicopter fell in love with Reef Bay.

We bought our simple wood house… and spent the next 6 years pouring money into that house trying to make it livable… That process of neverending home improvement sure kept us busy and consumed a whole bunch of money.

Remember we moved to St. John to relax… and yet where there wasn’t chaos… we were determined to create it thru this environment of workers and tradesman that were always at our house…

I came to st john for peace… but I couldn’t handle it. Didn’t know what to do with it. but chaos… I knew all about that… that had been my life in NY… in the end the kaos that didn’t exist on St. John I brought with me.

As we approached 2006 we had to examine where we came from, where we were and where our new home was going… The arrival of public housing projects… definitely a stateside idea that had been tried with disastrous results… rising crime… burglaries.. shootings… low quality food at high prices.. crowded beaches, even in summer… out of control building… including a giant going in right next door…

Was this why we came to St. John?

In the end we looked around and realized that sj was no longer the “nature’s paradise” it once was… and that it wasn’t New York either… we realized that we were powerless against a majority that seemed determined to create another St. Thomas on St. John…

This wasn’t where we wanted to be…

At the same time we had made many friends… and our three daughters had as well…

In the end I believe that was what we miss most about st john… the close personal community that we became apart of… we will miss you more than the pretty beaches and mangoes in August.

We love you…
The Vickers Family